[A-List] The Secret History of America's War on Drugs

["Tony B." <tal1@xxxxxxxxx>]

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From: Tony B.
To: Tony B.
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 7:12 PM (Counterpunch)
Subject: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs



Review by Carlo Parcelli

"Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal,
rape, and pillage with the sanction and the blessing of the All-Highest."
-George White, Federal Bureau of Narcotics & Central Intelligence Agency

The Strength of the Wolf:
The Secret History of America's War On Drugs
by Douglas Valentine
Verso Press, London/NY, 2004. 554pgs.

Back in the 1980's, during the era of William Casey's CIA, there were 
reports circulating in the alternative press about an international drug 
smuggling operation involving the mujaheddin in Afghanistan fighting the 
Soviets, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pakistani military, 
including elements of its intelligence service, the Inter Service 
Intelligence or ISI. At one point the CIA, in an effort to ramp up this 
smuggling operation, sought to requisition 400 vehicles, including dozens of 
transport trucks from the Department of Defense. The Pentagon refused, but 
the CIA appealed to Reagan's Vice President, career spook George H.W. Bush, 
through the National Security Council. The CIA got its trucks.
At that time there were 17 Drug Enforcement Agents stationed in Islamabad, 
the largest contingent in the world at the time outside of the United 
States, according to Alfred W. Mc Coy in his classic history The Politics of 
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. (The number I remember 
reading at the time was 14 agents, still a formidable number for a single 
overseas station.) This contingent of DEA agents was "pushing paper" in 
Islamabad when "[i]n marked contrast ...a single Norwegian detective, 
[Oyvind Olsen,] broke a heroin case that led directly to the leader of 
Pakistan, General Zia ul Haq's private banker."
The CIA's close relationship to elements in the Zia regime, including the 
ISI, were well known. Also the agency's ties to heroin and raw opium 
smuggler and mujaheddin leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were becoming 
problematic as revelations of U.S. complicity in the drug trade bloomed. 
Hekmatyar has turned on his American allies and is currently battling the 
CIA-installed Hamid Karzai regime in Afghanistan. This is not surprising. He 
was a founder of the Islamic brotherhood and led student demonstrations in 
Kabul in the 1970's and remains a member of the Jamaat-i Islami (Party of 
Islam), "a fundamentalist and quasi-fascist Muslim group with many followers 
inside the Pakistani officer corps." The U.S. State Department and the 
mainstream media never fail to mention in their public comments that 
Hekmatyar is a "narco-terrorist," as though all those years he worked hand 
in hand with the CIA he was a choirboy. He was particularly close to another 
drug dealer, Jesse Helms, former Senator from North Carolina.
What was the Reagan administration's response to this torrent of reports 
tying the CIA to mujaheddin/ISI drug smuggling? As the Islamabad branch of 
the DEA began to stir around the reports of convoys of arms going up to 
Afghanistan and bringing drugs back, the Reagan people reassigned all but 
two agents, lest they interfere with the CIA drug operation. Pakistan 
virtually overnight went from a country with a few thousand heroin abusers 
to 1.3 million addicts.
And this is where Doug Valentine's study of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 
The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs, 
proves itself essential. The FBN was a precursor of the DEA and the Bureau 
of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or BNDD; and as such, repeatedly, both 
worked with and ran afoul of the CIA and the national security apparatus in 
its pursuit of national and international drug cartels. Valentine draws much 
of his narrative from interviews with former FBN agents whose frustration 
with and anger at interference by the CIA and the national security 
apparatus interference is palpable.
The amount of information Valentine crams into his text is formidable and 
often takes on the texture of the dense web of law enforcement, felonious 
behavior, and intrigue he's illuminating. Some sets of passages reveal 
corruption so deep and pervasive that it's "thrilling", to borrow Dirty 
Lenny's term. Any one of dozens of cases Valentine touches on could have 
become one of Mark Lombardi's elegant and complex graphs of corruption.
For example, Valentine quotes from a memo from Ed Lansdale, the head of 
Operation Mongoose, part of JM/WAVE, which in part plotted to assassinate 
Castro as well as other Cubans and destroy Cuba's infrastructure. Lansdale 
wrote: "Gangster elements might prove the best recruitment potential for 
actions [murders] against police G-2 (intelligence) officials. CW [Chemical 
Warfare] agents should be fully considered." And recent documents have 
proven that CW were used as well as biological weapons against crops and the 
hog population of the island nation. Lansdale is ubiquitous in the annals of 
U.S. foreign policy. He can be found at the Huk rebellion, Vietnam/Laos, as 
well as Kennedy assassination. There is a hagiography on Lansdale which has 
its uses if you can read between the lines. But for biting insight into just 
how cultural chauvinists like Lansdale or Ted Shackley can fuck things up, 
read Richard Drinnon's chapters on the former in his Facing West: The 
Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building.
As it turns out, the gangsters in Lansdale's employ were the very gangsters 
the FBN was chasing--Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and 
Lucky Luciano.
On the very next page, we get Bobby Kennedy et al. Not the indefatigably 
noble Bobby Kennedy of the current Emilio Estevez hagiography, but the 
historical Bobby Kennedy:
While Bobby Kennedy was using Mafia drug smugglers in murder plots against 
Castro [Robert Kennedy was intimately involved with Operation Mongoose], and 
thus neutralizing the FBN, the CIA was relocating its Havana station and 
anti-Castro terror activities to Miami. Known as JM/WAVE, the station was 
managed by Theodore Shackley, a protée;gée; of Bill Harvey from Germany. It 
included Lansdale's Mongoose unit, and some 400 CIA case officers. Already 
the preferred habitat of America's mobsters, Miami was soon packed with 
dozens of CIA front companies. Thousands of CIA informers and assets, and 
several drug smuggling terror teams financed by wacky privateers like 
William Pawley, mentioned in Chapter 5 as having engineered the Pawley-Cooke 
Advisory Mission in Taiwan.
Reader's Digest Press published career spook Ted Shackley's book The Third 
Option in 1981. The book is such self-righteous bluster as to be laughable 
coming from a man who was stung by the Church and Pike committee reports and 
forced to fake his retirement from the Agency. "Shackley, having met drug 
lord General Vang Pao in Miami during his cooling off period, was reassigned 
as station chief to Laos." He needed to chill in Vientiane because "he'd 
been caught selling 50 kilograms of morphine base to FBN agent Bowman 
Taylor."
"How could the United States project power into distant lands, thus 
restoring some control over events which threaten our very survival?" 
Shackley asks. His answer: counter-insurgency and para-military operations 
like JM/WAVE, the Phoenix Program, and Operation Mongoose. Shackley is never 
clear how events in Nicaragua, the Congo, Bangladesh, Chile, Burkina Faso or 
Haiti etc. ad nauseum "threaten [the] very survival" of the U.S., a piece of 
political hyperbole obviously designed to disguise naked imperialism. But 
the global nature of American hegemony is clear in the statement.
So Ted Shackley in Florida! No wonder it was so easy for him to plug into 
the drugs and illegal arms side of the Iran-Contra affair, along with a bevy 
of Miami Cubans accused of drugs and arms smuggling, sabotage and murder, 
including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who blew up a Cuban 
airliner, killing all aboard. Is that in your Bobby Kennedy legacy, Emilio? 
It's what you often find among American politicians; relatively benign 
domestic policy - fodder-friendly -- yet a foreign policy, the tool of 
empire, that is cruel, vindictive, even sadistic.
But wait, it gets better, Golden Triangle fans! "To cover a fraction of the 
costs of this massive enterprise, former spymaster Paul L. E. Helliwell 
established and directed a string of drug money laundering banks for the 
CIA. At the time, Helliwell was general counsel for the Thai consulate in 
Miami, an active leader in the Republican Party, and a friend of Nixon's 
cohort, Bebe Rebozo. Among his drug smuggling credentials, Helliwell had 
worked with Chiang Kai-Shek's intelligence chief, General Tai Li, and had 
set up the CIA's drug smuggling air force, CAT [Civil Air Transport](later 
Air America), as well as the Bangkok trading company Sea Supply, which 
provided cover for CIA officers advising the drug-smuggling Thai border 
police."
Against this new OSS/CIA backdrop of international criminality disguised as 
national security, the FBN was assigned the task of keeping America's 
streets safe from drugs. As Valentine points out, the long and bitter 
dissolution of the FBN had begun.
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, FBN, which was formed on June 30th, 1930, 
from the remnants of the Narcotics Division, the corrupt Prohibition Unit of 
the Internal Revenue Service, and the Treasury Department's Foreign Control 
Board, antedates the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the precursor to 
the CIA, by over two decades. The CIA's role in the international drug trade 
and how it warped, thwarted, and finally made a mockery of U.S. drug policy 
cannot be stressed enough. Valentine himself begins his introduction with a 
discussion of how, after finishing work on his excellent study of the 
'Phoenix Program', he turned to the FBN. The Phoenix Program was turned over 
to the CIA by the DoD midstream. This put the CIA in an ideal position to 
protect its Golden Triangle drug smuggling turf and infiltrate and subvert 
DEA efforts to stem the international drug trade after the end of the U.S. 
incursion into Vietnam and Southeast Asia (see mujaheddin story above).
Not that the FBN, anymore than the BNDD or DEA, was a sainted organization. 
> From its inception in 1930 to just under a decade before its dissolution, it 
was headed by Harry Jacob Anslinger, who was recommended by then head of the 
Foreign Relations committee, Stephen G. Porter (R-PA), and that paragon of 
truth and beauty, yellow journalist, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, William 
Randolph Hearst. Anslinger was a bureaucratic brown-noser with little 
interest in real drug enforcement and little idea of how to proceed. His 
main concern was preserving his power and maneuvering his little fiefdom 
politically while in the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover's far more powerful FBI. 
Lucky Luciano appropriately nicknamed Anslinger, Harry 'Asslicker.'
Post-World War II American foreign policy is often grotesque, and as 
Valentine makes clear, the FBN managed to find itself entangled in more than 
its share of bizarre machinations. Sometimes FBN agents pursuing a case were 
suddenly told to back off, often without explanation, or removed altogether. 
Other times they were willing participants eager to take part in the Bureau's 
sexy, Ed Wood-like cross-dressing fantasies or to abet felonies like drug 
dealing and murder.
Not that the FBN didn't have its law enforcement moments. One of its best 
agents was Charles Siragusa, who nearly became Anslinger's heir to head the 
bureau. Siragusa opened the FBN's first overseas office in Rome and 
liaisoned there with the CIA.
Siragusa drew the line at facilitating drug trafficking, but helped the CIA 
in other ways. For example he helped black-bag CIA money to Italian 
politicians for James [Jesus] Angleton, the CIA's aggressive 
counter-intelligence chief...
Siragusa was especially helpful to the CIA when it came to investigating 
diversions of Marshall Plan aid. In one case he learned through an informer 
that the commercial attachée; at the Romanian Embassy [the U.S.'s secret 
Communist ally] in Berne was diverting American-made ball-bearings to the 
Soviet Union, which the Soviets used to build tanks for North Korea. 
According to Siragusa, the attachée; traded the ball-bearings for heroin as 
part of a sinister scheme to steal strategic materials with one hand from 
the West, while the other poisoned it with smack.
As a result of the Berne case, a CIA team was sent to Rome under military 
cover to stop diversions, and with Siragusa's help it intercepted all manner 
of strategic items, including uranium for the Soviet atomic energy program.
James Jesus Angleton is loosely portrayed by Mat Damon in Robert DeNiro's 
film 'The Good Shepherd.' But it's doubtful that Damon communicates the very 
non-photogenic, spidery creepiness of the alcohol-soaked real thing. One 
retired CIA officer told me about a dinner party he attended where Angleton 
was also a guest. Angleton turned to the young spook and began asking him 
questions about his family background, beliefs, aspirations, etc. As he 
posed his questions, he pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket and 
began keeping notes on the answers. The paranoid Angleton continued taking 
notes the entire evening. So much for Emily Post meets Skull and Bones.
The FBN was involved in other notable cases, for example the famous French 
Connection and agent Frank Selvaggi's Valachi investigation. Much of the FBN's 
drug enforcement activity, however, was directed at street level dealers and 
users, especially among America's blacks and disenfranchised. Much like 
today, street busts were easier and the numbers could be used to justify 
funding. And if you didn't go too high up you wouldn't run afoul of the 
powers that be like the CIA and get your ass fired or worse. When in the 
early 1950's the FBN was closing in on the Pahlavi family and the Shah of 
Iran through the Shah's brother, Mahmoud Pahlavi, who along with other 
members of his family owned huge opium farms, they sat on the information 
because "the CIA was plotting to overthrow the government in Iran, and 
reinstall the Shah." And indeed in 1953 the CIA overthrew the elected 
government of Mohammed Mossadegh and installed their favorite Persian drug 
dealers, the Pahlevis. Numerous other drug dealers from the Kuomintang to 
the Thai royal family and the Contras got a similar free pass flooding the 
streets of the world's major cities with drugs.
Take a more recent analogy. Reporter Gary Webb, for his reporting on the 
CIA/Contra drug smuggling connection to the 'Freeway' Ricky Ross and the Los 
Angeles crack epidemic, was roundly vilified by the mainstream media 
protecting its masters. Webb was also hounded by various agencies of the 
U.S. government. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to contradict without 
explanation its own earlier reporting on 'Freeway' Ricky and his influence 
on the L.A. crack epidemic in order to protect the CIA in the name of 
national security. The whole hypocritical episode is laid out by Alexander 
Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and The Press. As 
for Gary Webb: despondent over the outing of such a fine Ivy League crew as 
the CIA and their noble 'founding father'-like buddies, the Contras, he 
allegedly committed suicide à la Danny Casolaro in December of 2004.
Valentine's book also expands on the FBN's role in one of the seediest 
episodes involving the CIA, the creation of the American counter-culture or 
MKULTRA. As you might recall, MKULTRA was a program under the supervision of 
OSS/CIA scientist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb approached Harry Anslinger 
to enlist the services of FBN agent George White, in effect making White 
both an employee of the FBN and the OSS/CIA. All of this is nicely reprised 
in John Marks' The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind 
Control The Story of the Agency's Secret Efforts to the Control Human 
Behavior. For the perpetually naive I recommend the Church and Pike 
congressional committee reports or the books of CIA Inspector General Lyman 
B. Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick, for example, closed the case, ruling the 
mysterious death of Frank Olson a suicide. The CIA scientist, who 
specialized in airborne diseases like anthrax, was surreptitiously slipped 
LSD at a CIA social gathering. After a bad trip, Olson plunged to his death 
from a window of the Manhattan Statler Hilton several days later, in the 
presence of CIA psychiatrist Robert Lashbrook. Police initially called the 
crime scene a homicide until Kirkpatrick stepped in.
The ostensible reason for this CIA 'research' which embraced LSD and other 
hallucinogens was to create a 'truth serum.' Added to that project were 
various attempts to control behavior, in effect creating assassins 
chemically, the Manchurian Candidate. Better assassins through chemistry. 
But mostly it was used as a party drug by the Agency and a small group of 
elites who were creating the nascent vocabulary of mind expansion. The OSS 
project began under the supervision of Dr. Winfred Overholser of St. 
Elizabeth's Hospital, who also oversaw Ezra Pound's treatment there during 
the 1950's. Overholser used a dozen unsuspecting guinea pigs from the 
Manhattan Project, possibly searching for Soviet or German spies. A liquid 
concentrate of marijuana was used but with no discernible results other than 
to make the young scientists ill. Whether Overholser was tripping while 
treating Pound is lost to posterity.
When George White came on board, he had bigger plans. White used FBN 'safe 
houses' and apartments around the country, including the birthplace of the 
counter-culture, San Francisco, for illicit trysts and parties among FBN, 
CIA, and other law enforcement and intelligence people. The 'program' 
expanded to include unwitting victims, acquaintances, prostitutes, 
musicians, etc. White would spike the punch with a cocktail of hallucinogens 
and their variants, often triggering hallucinations & even psychosis in his 
unsuspecting victims. Many suffered permanent psychological damage. For many 
more no record exists of what effect this clandestine drugging might have 
had on them. Years later in a personal letter to Sid Gottlieb, George White 
wrote an epitaph for his role in the CIA:
"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled 
wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else 
could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage 
with the sanction and the blessing of the All-Highest?
The breadth of drug-related events in the post-World War II world the FBN 
had a stake in is extraordinary. Though corruption flourished within the 
bureau throughout its history, it's the FBN's connection with broad 
historical events from a relatively unique perspective, often in the agents' 
own words, that makes Valentine's reprise fresh and informative.
Valentine makes clear that three of the forces most prominent in defining 
the underlying international drug trade are the Mafia, the anti-Castro 
Cubans, and the CIA, with the CIA shielding the other two entities at every 
turn. Of the three, the Mafia is the most pervasive. Its underworld figures, 
like Arnold Rothstein who, besides running drugs, fixed the 1919 World 
Series, helped establish a need for a law enforcement agency that focused 
specifically on drugs. The anti-Castro Cubans were often Mafia figures 
unhappy about the Commies cleaning up their little island whore house. No 
more could a U.S. Congressman be lured to Havana with promises of unlimited 
sex with eight-year old boys in exchange for political favors.
The CIA's connection, of course, began with 'Wild Bill' Donovan's old OSS 
and its recruitment of Lucky Luciano and the Corsican mafiosi to beat and 
murder Communist union dockworkers in Marseilles and elsewhere along the 
Mediterranean Coast, and to seize Sicily from the Communists. With CIA 
blessing, and using drug running as a way of financing activities, the Mafia 
set up drug supply routes back to the U.S. Many an FBN operation would trace 
the drugs back to Mafia sources, in turn supplied through Lebanon, Turkey, 
Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East, only to be thwarted by the 
far more powerful CIA stepping in and terminating the investigation on 
national security grounds.
But nowhere has CIA drug smuggling been more pervasive, longstanding, and 
crucial to the financing of black ops and low intensity conflict than in the 
Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia. This raw opium and heroin preserve 
straddles northern Burma/Myanmar, southern Yunnan province in China, and 
northern Thailand stretching to Vientiane in southern Laos. The CIA 
officially took over drug smuggling operations from the French after Dien 
Bien Phu and along with the Corsicans, and especially the darlings of 
Washington political establishment, Reader's Digest, and Claire Chennault, 
Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang.
The Kuomintang were involved in the drug trade in southern China well before 
there was an American presence in the region. But corrupt allies like Meo 
tribal leader Vang Pao who now resides in Orange County, California, were 
actually enlisted by the Agency. Vang Pao, a persistent critic of the 
godless and comparatively drugless Vietminh and Pathet Lao, helped organize 
the recent anti-Vietnam protests, in advance of George Bush's visit to 
Hanoi, with the help of the California Republican Party, as the two have 
done on many occasions.
Competition for the drug trade remains fierce in the Golden Triangle to this 
day. As Valentine points out, the CIA then as now remains in the thick of 
it, even as the FBN proved ineffectual or too corrupt or bureaucratically 
incompetent to be effective. Drawing from Alfred McCoy's earlier classic The 
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Valentine reprises a popular story of 
the CIA's heroic defense of its opium trade and life-and-death free market 
competition of the Golden Triangle:
As world attention focused ever more closely on America's conduct in the 
Vietnam War, the CIA's need to conceal its major role in the regional drug 
trade became a top priority. The climactic point came in June 1967, when 
Burmese War Lord Khun Sa decided to sell 16 tons of opium in Houei Sai. 
Construing this as a challenge to their precious monopoly over supply, the 
Kuomintang generals mobilized their forces in Burma and marched across the 
border into Laos. Apprised of the situation, CIA station chief Ted Shackley 
in Vientiane informed Pat Landry, chief of the CIA's major base in Udorn, 
Thailand. Landry ordered Air Force Major Richard Secord to send a squadron 
of T-28s to the rescue. Within hours, the battle had ended with both Khun Sa 
and the Kuomintang in full retreat, and the Laotians in total control.
Most readers probably first heard of Richard Secord during Iran-Contra when 
he and his partner, Albert Hakim, supplied the U.S. proxy army fighting 
against the Sandinistas and flooding U.S. drug markets with Contra cocaine. 
Especially hard hit was South Central Los Angeles, which Contra and Agency 
asset Danilo Blandon and 'Freeway' Ricky Ross flooded with Colombian cocaine 
with the enthusiastic support of the CIA and Reagan administration 
officials. This is the story Gary Webb broke. And the spread of coke, 
especially crack, is why you ended up with Crips dealing in Mineola and 
Duluth and Scranton as well as the AIDS epidemic and the hundreds of 
millions of dollars made from the mandatory sentencing craze and the penal 
housing boom it fuels. (The sad saga is also reprised in Cockburn and St. 
Clair's White Out, cited above.)
CIA agent Ted Shackley, called the Blond Ghost, the consummate 'spook,' 
shows up in the index of practically every book ever written on the illegal 
drug trade, political assassination, and sabotage from the earliest days of 
the U.S. takeover from the French in Vietnam to Operation Mongoose and the 
Phoenix Program, right through Iran-Contra. He famously said: "I fought the 
communists for twenty-eight years. I did a lot of bad things for my country. 
But I loved my country and did what I thought best."
Of course, the case is easily made that Shackley also did a lot of bad 
things TO his country. Jonathan Kwitny, in his book The Crimes of Patriots: 
A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, sums up Shackley's career 
thus: "Looking at the list of disasters Shackley has presided over during 
his career, one might even conclude that on the day the CIA hired Shackley 
it might have done better hiring a KGB agent; a Soviet mole probably could 
not have done as much damage to the national security of the United States 
with all his wiles as Shackley did with the most patriotic of intentions."(p.291)
Valentine points out, and as 'Freeway' Ricky Ross and Contra cocaine 
confirm, [that the FBN as well as the CIA, DEA, FBI, the Los Angeles Times, 
The Washington Post et al.] racism and class warfare play an enormous role 
in who is the enemy in the so-called 'war on drugs.' It was the Danilo 
Blandon Contra drug connection with 'Freeway' Ricky Ross in Los Angeles than 
led to the pandemic of crack use in the U.S., and the seeming anomaly of 
finding Crips establishing drug markets all across the heartland. During the 
1980's Ted Shackley and his friends Thomas Clines and Felix Rodriguez were 
part of the drug smuggling operation out of Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador 
that fueled that pandemic. CIA asset John Hull served the same function 
forming what was known as the 'Southern Front' from his ranch in Costa Rica 
along the Nicaraguan border.
Apropos of the customary targets of the FBN, and the FBN's history of 
cutting law enforcement corners and corruption, agent Jim Attie summarized 
his experience as an agent as follows: "I'm not proud of what I did. It was 
dirty job. It was a form of amorality, and to this day I feel tremendous 
guilt and have unending nightmares as a result of what I did as a narcotic 
agent." Attie himself exited the FBN after his fellow agents in the New York 
office, where he had recently been reassigned, slipped LSD into his coffee. 
Attie merited the reassignment because he had called his boss Anslinger "a 
manipulator and a cheapskate" who knew nothing about real narcotics work.
The FBN was involved in myriad aspects of the investigation of the infamous 
French Connection. The French Connection had its origins in French 
intelligence, the SDECE, operating in French Indo-China. This drug smuggling 
operation provided essential funding to the French military and enhanced its 
ability to wage war against insurgencies in that region. This is the 
operation the CIA would inherit working with the traditional drug lords in 
the Golden Triangle and the French Corsican mob. Further, "In 1963 Laos 
would withdraw from the UN's 1961 Single Convention and, under the guidance 
of the CIA, start mass-producing narcotics to support the CIA's own secret 
army of Laotion hill tribesmen, some 450 more of whom just surrendered to 
Laotian authorities in December of 2006."
The FBN also made the initial bust on Joe Valachi, laboriously working their 
way up through his contacts. They also elicited some of his notorious 
revelations about the mob. A rookie agent in late 1958, Frank Selvaggi, 
along with his senior partner Art Mendelsohn and veteran NYPD narcotic 
detective Harold Kunin, arrested Helen Streat, a heroin addict and a 
prostitute in Harlem. Eventually through a series of busts, payoffs and 
'vigorous' interrogations, a Selvaggi informant, Robert Wagner, 'gave' the 
FBN Valachi and he was arrested. Facing sentencing in court, Valachi began 
to set up and talk about members of the Genovese crime family.
And because the FBN was mandated to pursue illicit drugs, and because 
illicit drugs were a core business of the Mafia, the anti-Castro Cuban 
community, and the CIA, the FBN found itself smack dab in the middle of the 
Holy Grail of all conspiracies, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But as 
Valentine points out, you'd be hard pressed to find relevant FBN activity in 
any official investigation of Kennedy's assassination. For example, in 1958 
the FBN was aware that Joseph Civello was Carlos Marcello's "deputy in 
Dallas" and that Jack Ruby was part of Civello's organization. FBN agent 
John Cusack linked Civello with Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and Jimmy 
Hoffa - the House Select Committee on Assassinations' three prime suspects 
in the Kennedy assassination. But the FBN was never called to testify, nor 
were their files requested.
Valentine lays out other FBN connections that went unexplored by the Warren 
Commission and other official investigations, none 'eerier' than the 
connection with the main figures in the aforementioned MKULTRA project which 
had for one of its main goals the creation of a Manchurian Candidate, a 
'patsy,' to borrow Lee Harvey Oswald's term.
"The three main suspects in the assassination [of JFK] - Marcello, 
Trafficante, and Hoffa - were million dollar men" e.g individuals who for 
services rendered and classified information were privy to were shielded 
from prosecution by the CIA. "And the CIA prevented the FBN from going after 
these drug traffickers, or investigating CIA agents like Irving Brown - and 
perhaps even Michael Mertz - in Angleton's French connection."
There's Oswald's claim of being a mere 'patsy' in the assassination of 
Kennedy. Then there's the connection that FBN files and interviews with 
former agents reveal between Ruby and the Marcello crime family and a number 
of other connections that Valentine lays out. In this light, not only Oswald 
but Ruby himself and Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin, could have 
been patsies.
On 29 November 1963, a week after the president was murdered, Marshall 
Carter, the deputy director of the CIA, met with Richard Helms, John Earman, 
James Angleton, Sid Gottlieb, and Lyman Kirkpatrick. What a group! At this 
meeting the CIA chiefs agreed to continue testing unwitting subjects through 
MKULTRA using the FBN and its safehouses. To this end they launched MKULTRA 
Subproject 149 in New York in January 1964, specifically to provide a 
replacement for [FBN agent] Charlie Siragusa.
Siragusa had gotten tangled up in MKULTRA, Operation Mongoose plots to 
murder Castro, and other CIA intrigues when his boss Bill Anslinger sent 
Siragusa to solicit the help of Cuba's new leader Fidel Castro in the 
apprehension of 50 major drug traffickers that had formerly called Batista's 
Cuba their second home. Castro, who was in the Sierra Maestra when Batista 
was pimping for the mob and the CIA, couldn't be of much help, and Siragusa 
began to suspect what was eventually to become the obvious, that Trafficante 
was protected by the CIA and that a recent murder charge in the Albert 
Anastasia assassination case was dismissed at the Agency's behest.
This review can't do Valentine's book justice. The rich detail of the CIA's 
effectiveness in blocking FBN efforts to pursue international drug 
traffickers is worth the price of admission alone.